Italian Quarterly

Italian Quarterly is a scholarly journal founded in 1957 by Carlo Luigi Golino, then chairman of the Italian Department and shortly thereafter Dean of the Humanities at the Los Angeles of the University of California (UCLA). He later served as a Dean and Vice chancellor at UC Riverside and as Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Originally published by the University of California and co-sponsored by the Dante Alighieri Society of Los Angeles, its original editorial board included eminent figures in the field of Italian Studies such as Lowry Nelson, Jr. (Yale University), Pier Maria Pasinetti (UCLA), Charles Speroni (UCLA), Michael De Filippis (UC Berkeley), Paolo Milano (Queens College, and literary critic for the Italian magazine L’Espresso), Mario Pei (Columbia University), Renato Poggioli (Harvard University), and Charles S. Singleton (Johns Hopkins University).

Published quarterly, over its first two decades the journal reflected the eclectic scholarly and intellectual interest of its editorial board, spanning from translated contemporary poetry, to scholarly reflections on both past and present authors (e.g., Carlo Goldoni, Ugo Foscolo, Dino Campana, Eugenio Montale, Italo Svevo, Salvatore Quasimodo, Giovanni Verga, and of course, Dante), to reviews of contemporary academic and non-academic books. IQ also advanced Golino’s goal of making Italian culture more legible to a US audience and, as such, its contributions went beyond literary criticism of canonical literature but also ventured into Italian consumer culture, fine arts, and politics. 

The abundant reflections on the reception of Italian culture in the United States in the volumes published under his oversight between 1957 and 1978 are evidence of Golino’s commitment to building bridges and mediating between Italy and the United States. Of particular interest is issue #3 published in the spring of 1959 and devoted entirely to the cultural relations between the United States and Italy. The issue opens with an essay by Giuseppe Prezzolini, in which he attributes the decline of popularity of Italian Studies to the shift in self-fashioning and perception—from the cradle of Western civilization, to a site of touristic consumption—towards Italy. In the following contribution, a then-early-career Leslie Aaron Fiedler corroborates Prezzolini’s argument by suggesting that “the recent interest in the Italian arts is bounded on the one side by notions of chic sponsored by elegant lady magazines and, on the other, by the demands of the importing business ... it is the moves which help make the transition from goods to work of art.” However, per Fiedler, the attraction of the American masses for the post-war filmic representations of Italy were also countered by a rediscovery of Italy by American intellectuals. For instance, authors such as Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, William Jay Smith, and W.H. Auden took advantage of conspicuous funding streams to take up temporary residence in Italy and attune their literary production to the aesthetic sensibility developed therein. Of notable interest is also Vincent Luciani’s commentary. In his contribution, the then-faculty of Italian at the City University of New York, underlines how in the period between 1947 to 1958, more translations of contemporary Italian fiction were published in the US, than in any previous decade. Luciani attributes this spike not only to the interest that Italy sparked in US audiences post-WWII, but also to the “universal value” (as opposed to the regionalistic nature of other European countries) upon which Italian literature reflects. Other contributors to the issue include Golino himself, Mario Soldati, Dante della Terza, and Thomas G. Bergin. 

As of 2022, IQ is still in publication, under the auspices of the Italian Department of Rutgers University.

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